


Entanglement

by rivkat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Eight crazy nights, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-18
Updated: 2012-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-29 17:44:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For avidrosette: during 5.22, what if Dean had thrown himself into the pit with Sam? Extends through S6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entanglement

Alastair always said, never trust anything that bleeds for thirty years and lives. Lives in a manner of speaking, anyway.

It was good advice, Dean thought as he picked the lock, his fingers slippery with his own blood. It wasn’t really a lock, the same way he didn’t really have a body, which was to say that he did in all the ways that mattered except for being able to die and get some rest. So it was a lock, and Dean did know how to pick locks, for all that Sam had been faster.

Was faster.

The Cage wasn’t like regular Hell. Smaller (but still infinitely large, large as Lucifer’s rage, large enough to wander in forever if you got lost; Dean didn’t want to get lost in here), and more malleable to Lucifer’s will. Whenever Lucifer really wanted to get his torturer on, he found Sam and Dean.

So far, he’d only taken one at a time, betting correctly that the ultimately futile fight to rescue the captured one was enough suffering for the other. Mostly he took Sam, but he switched it up from time to time even though, as torturers went, he was midgrade at best. Big picture guy, Dean supposed. He could make it hurt, of course, but he couldn’t make Dean feel bad about it. Maybe that was because Lucifer wasn’t really after anything. He could’ve offered Dean the chance to come off the rack and take the knife to Sam, but he hadn’t yet bothered and Dean didn’t see it happening any time soon.

Lucifer would torture Sam and Dean would hunt him down in this endlessly reconfiguring cage, and, when Michael got interested enough to have another throwdown with Lucifer, Dean would take his chance. They’d get out, they’d run, and they’d hide until Lucifer got interested enough to come find them again.

It was going to be like this forever. Dean tried not to think about that, because he was pretty sure that being crazy forever was worse than plain old living forever. Pretty sure.

The lock gave, and Dean slipped into a hallway decorated with spikes so thick on the walls and floor and ceiling that there was no way through without being cut and cut again. Dean rolled his eyes and pushed his way down, towards the light at the end.

Dean was just cutting the ropes of muscle and tendon that were holding Sam down—grown out of the skin-and-bone table, and, okay, Dean was going to award style points on that one—when there was a new sound, pop pop like fireworks going off way overhead, and the room was washed in brilliant, painful light. Dean felt something like his teeth leaving their sockets, except more like when he was a kid losing baby teeth than the more current ripped-out-with-pliers feeling: something stuck, but not too tight, had been pulled out, leaving a weird but not entirely unpleasant hollow.

And then it was gone.

“Did you see that?” Sam asked when Dean removed the chunks of lung that had been gagging him. It was a fair question, since apparently the Cage looked a bit different to each of them. Sam always looked just like Sammy, clean and unscarred; Dean hadn’t ever been brave enough to ask what Sam might see when he looked at Dean.

Dean nodded. “No fucking clue what it was,” he said. “Maybe Mike and Lucy found some new way to jerk each other off.”

So they hauled ass (Dean doing most of the hauling; even in Hell healing wasn’t instantaneous unless your torturer wanted it so) and got out of there.

****

“I told you to go to Lisa and Ben,” Sam said, once, while they were curled up together underneath something that looked very much like an old wooden pew. Outside, Lucifer was stalking them. Dean thought it was probably for show, but there was an off chance that he really didn’t know everything that went on inside the Cage, and anyway any hour with both of them not bleeding had to count as a decent hour.

Dean shrugged. “She’s gonna find herself an awesome guy. Maybe have a bunch more kids. Ben’s got her. You telling me I was supposed to look at that hole still swirling away and _not_ go after you?”

“You went into the Pit for me again,” Sam said, and even in the near darkness Dean could see the guilt in his eyes.

“Asswipe,” he said and knuckle-rapped Sam sharply across the shoulder. “You’re gonna make me fucking _say_ how much I don’t care as long as we’re together?”

“But now there’s just this.” Sam took a deep breath. “No food, no sleep, no sex, just running and getting caught and sliced up and running again. Forever.”

Dean swallowed. “Well, you know, Heaven kinda sucked balls too. So I’m thinking, better together than apart, right?” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I don’t really miss that other stuff. Haven’t exactly had the urge.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “ _You_ haven’t been horny? This really is Hell.”

“Shut up,” Dean said, and turned his face away, mostly to hide how he wasn’t that pissed. The whole non-desire thing had been a bit freaky at first when it happened a couple of months in—now he didn’t even miss burgers any more. As a side effect of being in Hell it didn’t exactly ping the importance meter compared to the constant running and bleeding and watching Sammy bleed. Alastair had been able to dangle all the temptations of the flesh in front of him; maybe he didn’t want those things any more because he knew what Hell’s versions were like. Or maybe it was just because he had the one most important thing with him regardless.

The door to their hideout creaked open, and the conversation was over.

****

Hundreds of years later, when Death pulled them out of the Cage, Dean couldn’t honestly say he was surprised. Die enough times, you start expecting it not to stick.

What was shocking was that, apparently, his and Sam’s bodies had been walking around topside for a year, soullessly hunting things and very occasionally saving people, courtesy of Cas. That had been the big boom they’d felt early on: the whatever-there-was in them that wasn’t their souls. The Egyptians apparently had a word for it, but Dean tuned Sam’s geeky explanation out because he was too busy trying to get Bobby to explain just exactly what their soul-free bodies had been doing.

“There’s things,” Bobby said and coughed, embarrassed. He didn’t meet Dean’s eyes. “You and Sam. Well. Cas says you ought to start remembering as the parts, ah, reintegrate. There might be some surprises.”

“Like _what_?” Bobby had already explained that they’d willingly sacrificed victims to get the baddies in a better position to be taken out, like with the shtriga except without the part where they jumped in and saved the day for the bait. Dean didn’t want to know what was worse than that, but he probably needed to.

Bobby sighed. “You—you weren’t exactly brotherly without your souls. Let’s just say—you’d best stay away from anybody who knows the Winchesters but don’t know the full story.”

Dean could imagine two soulless hunters moving like killer robots through the country, worse even than Gordon Walker. He had the bad feeling that Bobby meant more than that, but he couldn’t quite figure it out and Bobby was obviously done talking.

Also, Dean had other things on his mind. Like the creatures escaping from Purgatory and Cas’s weird behavior. What was almost worse, RoboDean had evidently kept himself in shape, which meant that Sam felt entitled to drag him on his stupid early-morning runs, and his alcohol tolerance was down to shit (bad for the hunt to be half-lit most of the time, which Dean knew, and without his soul there wasn’t much in need of numbing). On the plus side, RoboDean hadn’t gone over to rabbit food like Sam—when Dean tucked into a good bacon cheeseburger, he got flashes of memories of doing the same thing in restaurants he’d never visited while soul-encumbered.

Like Bobby said, the memories were arriving in spots and chunks. A soulless memory wasn’t exactly like a hallucination—Dean’d had enough of those to know—and it wasn’t anything like a regular memory, no emotions to guide him through the meaning or connections to other memories. Just documentary reporting, saw this then shot this then ate this, then woke up and did it again.

Unpleasant, but manageable.

Until the morning he woke with a pleasant hard-on, and was lazily thinking about showering and rubbing one out, and got a Technicolor flashback to riding Sam, Sam’s dick hot and thick inside him, Sam pumping his hips up to hit Dean in all the right places, Sam’s eyes closed and his head thrown back, biting his lower lip as he clenched his hands on Dean’s hips and Dean fisted his own cock and came all over Sam’s rock-hard abs and chest.

Dean pulled his hand out of his sweatpants, his dick so sensitive he nearly came anyway, and fell out of the bed with a thump that woke Sam.

“Dean?” Sam asked, confused, sitting bolt upright with his gun in his hand.

Dean curled over himself, hoping his erection wasn’t showing, and waved his hand weakly at Sam. “Sorry, I, uh. I’m gonna shower.”

“Before running?” Sam chided, and then his face changed—figuring out what Dean was probably planning to do in that shower. And then Dean saw the memory— _a_ memory, holy fuck it had been a year and there was no telling how many times they’d—anyway, Dean saw Sam remember something in the same genre as Dean’s little peep show, and Sam closed his mouth with an audible click of teeth.

So, while their souls had been canoodling in the Cage, their bodies had been making the beast with two backs. That was—

Shower. Cold shower.

Avoiding even a glance at Sam, he hotfooted it to the bathroom and shut the door between them.

****

“So, are we ever going to talk about this?” Sam asked that night as they pulled into the motel parking lot.

Dean didn’t dignify that with a response. In the past eight hours, he’d had three different memories rise up to punch him in the face (not to mention lower down). Dean had never exactly been inhibited in the sack—he’d try anything once, twice if it didn’t result in injury—but the soulless Wonder Twins had him beat by a mile.

He remembered one cleaning lady opening the door mid-fuck. Dean had _invited her to join them_ , and Sam had seconded the invitation. She’d had a nice rack, yes, but that wasn’t the point.

He remembered dressing up to get into a club and—okay, not going there.

The scariest memory, though, was just the two of them. Dean’s body was aching pleasantly in a bunch of places, and his dick was going to be sore; they’d been going at it for hours and there was no end in sight. Sam was staring down at him, sweat plastering his ridiculous bangs to his ridiculous forehead, his hands pinning Dean’s shoulders to the mattress. Sam’s cock was sliding in and out, just a couple of inches with each thrust but they were the right couple of inches. Dean’s legs were hitched up, his calves pressed against Sam’s waist, thoroughly pleased by the strain of muscles and the slip of skin against skin.

Dean—Dean-lite—looked right back up at Sam, concentration just as fierce as Sam’s. Pleasure thrummed through him with every heartbeat; he wasn’t going to come again any time soon, but he was still enjoying the heck out of getting nailed. He was happy not just because it felt so good but because of how much _Sam_ was enjoying it.

He hadn’t had a soul, but Dean was pretty much convinced that he’d loved Sam anyway.

“Does Bobby know?” Sam interrupted his thoughts. “He’s been acting weird since we—”

“Yeah, I think so,” Dean admitted. The only good thing about Dean’s own personal freakout was that he was _not_ thinking about Bobby.

Before this morning, Sam had maintained that the soulless versions _were_ them, in some fundamental way—they’d had Sam and Dean’s memories and they’d kept up with the mission, which spoke of a kind of morality even if they’d ignored a lot of collateral damage (and the two of them had always had a high body count; their partial versions just didn’t angst about it). Dean hadn’t bothered to form an opinion, what with Sam so convinced. What did Sam think now?

Dean got out of the car and did not slam his door. Sam, because he valued his hide, also didn’t slam his door, but he closed it in that particular Sam way that let Dean know that he was only _not_ slamming it because he didn’t want to give Dean an excuse to avoid the real subject of their fight, which was what put him in a door-slamming mood to begin with. (Dean’s car had many subtleties.)

In silence, they went to the room. Dean opened the door and went in, checking automatically to see if anyone was waiting with an ambush. No such luck; he sat down on his bed and watched Sam close and lock the door.

“This isn’t just something we can ignore until we get something else to worry about,” Sam continued as if there’d been no interruptions, which Dean figured was only fair—it wasn’t like Dean really participated very much in these conversations anyway.

Dean would’ve asked why not if he’d thought it would make a difference. With half of Hell and all of Purgatory out to get them, not to mention whatever the fuck Cas was doing, Dean thought that if there were any people in the world who could ignore soulless incest because there were more pressing matters at stake, it had to be the two of them. But, no.

“Maybe I was wrong, and they weren’t really us,” Sam said, testing the words out. Okay, so he was willing to talk for two. At least later he'd have no reason to object to Dean drinking for two, work on restoring that tolerance he’d lost. “It’s not like you want to sleep with me, right?”

Dean stared up at Sam. He couldn’t believe Sam had been _stupid_ enough to pull the pin on that grenade. Even without saying a word, he was answering that question, nothing he could do to stop himself.

“Oh my God,” Sam said, catching on, and Dean wished he could melt straight into the cheap and disgusting carpet.

“What did you expect!” Dean yelled, because the only option was to get angry. “You know how I—” he waved his hand around to indicate the existence of his warm and fuzzy feelings for Sam, his need to be near Sam and his fundamental certainty that only he could really make sure that Sam was okay—“and you know how it was.” Yes, there’d been an element of cold-eyed convenience to it: fucking each other was usually cheaper and simpler than finding some chick or two and either paying or pretending to give a shit. But also they’d been _good_ together, in perfect sync like on the best hunts. Hard to remember that and not want to go there again, even as it also made him hate himself.

“Okay,” Sam said, pushing his hair back from his face with both hands, a motion that highlighted the muscles of his arms—motherfucking fuck, Dean thought. “Okay.” Sam breathed out, turning away from Dean. “I get what you mean, believe me I do. But—”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, heavily.

Sam turned his head so that he was watching Dean again.

Dean didn’t know what more Sam wanted from him. It was back to the grinding hunts, blood and the road and Sam next to him, but never close enough. He could live like that; he had before and he had to again. He wished he’d never recovered a single second; knowing what he’d had and why was so cruel it seemed like Lucifer’s last trick.

“Why not?” Sam asked, like he’d just figured out the crucial piece of intel that would let them gank the bad guy.

“What?” Dean blinked at him, clueless.

“Why can’t we? We already did.”

“You just said it wasn’t us!” Dean yelled, exploding off his bed and stalking close enough to Sam so that if punching became necessary he wouldn’t have to work up to it. “We were running from Lucifer the whole time.”

“I’ve got a headful of memories says otherwise, and so do you.”

Dean growled. He knew he wasn’t much in the brains department, and his soul was as threadbare and stained as a human’s could get. So, sure, he was mostly just his body. But Sam, Sam had always been different from him, which meant that Dean was stuck with this _wanting_ , and Sam wasn’t going to be, not when he got used to the flashbacks.

Sam sighed and stepped closer, not quite touching but forcing Dean to meet his eyes if he didn’t want to look like a damned coward. “We’re soulmates, Dean. Together in Heaven, together in Hell by choice, and here on earth the same. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all suffering and pain.”

“Yeah, you got real good evidence for that,” Dean sneered.

“I think I do,” Sam said, as if it were simple. “I mean, when Lucifer wasn’t peeling strips off of one of us, when we were just _there_ \--did you even miss the rest of the world?”

Dean clenched his jaw. “Did you?”

“Honestly?” Sam tilted his head, examining Dean as if he were a half-completed Devil’s Trap in need of finishing. “It’s better up here, because I do want to save people and I’m not really a big fan of having my bones burned to ash in my living body. And I remember--” his hand stole up to rub the underside of his jaw, right where he’d loved Dean to bite him; all Dean had to do was set his teeth there and Sam would go right from zero to caveman. Dean’s mouth watered. He was so close he could smell Sam, cheap detergent and sweat and something darker.

Sam cleared his throat. “You said you didn’t mind going in the Pit with me. Was that true?”

“Of course it was!” How could he think for a second—

Sam put his hands on Dean’s shoulders. “Then do it again. Jump with me.”

All the alarms clanging in Dean’s head were fighting with the hope and the arousal, and he was going to shake apart before anything won. “What happens if I fuck it up,” he said, meaning ‘when.’

Sam smiled at him, broad and just a little wicked. “Then I will kick your ass until your head pops out.”

Dean was going to say something really awesome and cutting in response, except then Sam’s tongue was in his mouth, and Sam was trying to bend him back like just because Sam was taller he got to be the sailor in that famous Times Square clench, so Dean was obliged to ninja himself free enough to bite at the right spot on Sam’s neck. Predictably, that ended with Dean’s arms braced on the cheap dresser, head bent down as Sam hitched his thigh higher for better access, Sam’s mouth sharp and wet between Dean’s shoulderblades.

After, Sam pouted his way into getting Dean to lie down with him, without even cleaning up (there was no end to the sacrifices Dean was willing to make for Sam, really). They’d never done this before, Dean realized as Sam snuffled into Dean’s shoulder, his big hand spreading out over Dean’s belly. Even if soulless them had slept, they wouldn’t have used the same bed. So this was new.

This was, maybe, them being whole.


End file.
